Eldritch Moon review: Well damn, everything’s sprouted tentacles

The second half of Magic: The Gathering’s return to Innistrad, Eldritch Moon (EMN), will be released on July 22—but we've been lucky enough to play with the set already. Read on for our review of the newest addition to the Magic line, as the mystery of the madness infecting Innistrad is revealed...

Enlarge / Surprise! It was Emrakul who had been hiding out in Innistrad and was causing some, er, issues.

Moving on from the brooding sense of horror in Shadows over Innistrad (SOI), EMN is the big reveal, with the last Eldrazi titan—Emrakul—arriving on the plane to wreak havoc. For people who missed our other Magic reviews, Emrakul is one of three giant reality-warping creatures with clear Lovecraftian influences, and her tentacled touch is what’s behind the events in SOI.
From a game mechanics sense, this means the end of Investigate from the first set, as the mystery is solved, and the addition of several new mechanics—Emerge, Meld, and Escalate—to represent things going from bad to worse. In general, follow-up sets in Magic can be a little more experimental, as players now have had some time to get the grasp with the foundations, and EMN really delivers on the “new and weird” front.

The mechanics of Eldritch Moon

Madness, Delirium and transforming double-faced cards are all back, which is great news. Despite our issues with Delirium in SOI, the play experience of it has been pretty fun, and the other two have been brilliant, even with the slight physical-world troubles provided by double-faced cards. Madness especially is exciting to see more of, since a deck taking advantage of its unique discard/play mechanism now has more options from which to choose.
As ever, it’s hard to get the full story arc across in the tools a card game has available—a few scattered pieces of flavour text and small art pieces on every card—but the feel of the world being corrupted is on point. The art continues in the modern Magic tradition of showing definitive events and creatures in gorgeous full colour, and individual cards even tell their own little stories.

The cards in *EMN* do a good job of telling a story. Liliana arrives to save the day… with a bunch of Zombies / What's in the box? / Revive a dead creature, but split it into two: a little spirit with its abilities, and a dumb zombie body.

The story is also cleverly multi-level. If you want to just pick up the cards, appreciate the art, and not worry about the wider story, that’s fine—the core gameplay is still satisfying. If you want to appreciate some of the weirder cards, and build decks around them, you can. And if you’re dying to release your inner fantasy nerd, then Wizards of the Coast publishes full stories on its website. Some of these stories stand out a little more than others, especially those following some of the minor characters caught in the middle of EMN’s struggles, but they’re enjoyable enough overall.

Enlarge / In EMN, most transformations are one-way.

The greatest mood-setting that the game does, however, is still with its double-faced cards. One of the key themes in Innistrad is transformation, but the added twist with the Eldrazi is that almost all of the EMN transformations are irreversible—there’s no getting your nice humans back to normal once they’ve sprouted tentacles. There’s only one day/night transformation left for werewolves, with most of the new transforming wolves going from “terrible beast” to “terrible eldritch beast with 10 limbs."
You’ll notice that the other side of the double-faced cards are a little different too. They’re colourless, a callback to the nature of Eldrazi first explored through devoid back in the Zendikar block, as they transcend normal coloured mana. This theme continues through to one of the other new mechanics, Emerge, which appears on giant Eldrazi creatures with colourless mana costs—but with the option to burst forth from your existing creatures for coloured mana, getting a discount in exchange for sacrificing one of your allies.

Emerge cards give you some interesting options, like finding out what happens when you mix a classic fantasy creature with an alien abomination, or playing that crab/ship/Cthulhu hybrid you've always wanted.

These beasts serve several purposes from a design view, and are some of the best cards in the set from a gameplay perspective. Many Magic players enjoy casting huge spells and creatures, but the game is best when it supports multiple strategies, so that one way to play the game doesn’t become dominant.
Emerge cards can work in lots of different ways—decks that want to play it slow can hold out until they can pay the huge mana costs, whilst quicker decks can cash in their smaller creatures for larger ones to overwhelm their opponents early.
Escalate, the final new mechanic in EMN, doesn’t directly reflect the flavour of the Eldrazi, but rather is meant to reflect things getting out of hand on Innistrad. Escalate appears on a few modal spells in the set, giving a player the option to make the spell more powerful, but also more expensive.
Whilst not being as memorable or awesome as transformations, Escalate is a fine mechanic that leads to some solid gameplay choices should you play the spell early to try and gain the upper hand, or wait to cast it at its max potential later?

Wizards of the Coast

Here's our customary gallery of gorgeous art from Eldritch Moon. There are actually a lot more tentacles in the set than this gallery would have you believe.

Wizards of the Coast
Here's our customary gallery of gorgeous art from Eldritch Moon. There are actually a lot more tentacles in the set than this gallery would have you believe.
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast
Wizards of the Coast

Playing Eldritch Moon

A big part of the strength of the set is the developers inserting clues on how to best take advantage of the different mechanics. The set is full of support for Madness, Delirium and Emerge, even on cards that don’t even mention the mechanics by name. SOI did this well, but EMN is on another level, with the enabling cards—such as Noose Constrictor or Exultant Cultist—being both interesting in their own right and instructive to newer players on how to combo cards together to better effect.
The other big success is the sheer horror of the transformations—it’s not just werewolves that have been Eldrazified. There’s a horseman who ends up as a literal horse-man hybrid, a fisherman who ends up as a Eldrazi fish, and a pair of angels that Meld.

The front sides of Gisela and Bruna. Note the "meld" wording in the text...

The most experimental mechanic in EMN is also its best new addition—double-faced cards that Meld together into one giant creature. Mechanically, you turn over the cards, each depicting half of the resulting creature, and place them together as one giant double-sized card. Flavourwise, the double-sized art depicts the creatures actually being melded together, which is both disturbing and awesome. Gisela and Bruna end up as the distinctly less angelic Brisela:

Enlarge / If you ever wondered what would happen if two angels were merged together using some wibbly-gribbly Eldrazi magic... now you know. Behold, Brisela, Voice of Nightmares.

Wizards of the Coast

Here's the actual card; note that Brisela is actually the backsides of two different cards.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few meld cards in the set—three pairs of two each—but thankfully, one of the pairs is at the common rarity, so you’ll be able to easily get hold of it and try out the mechanic for yourself. Despite being proportionally the smallest part of the set, Meld is a nice spin on transformations that uses existing player knowledge to make things easier to understand, whilst pushing the horror angle even further than single-card transformations. There’s also the added bonus of the rarer Meld cards being playable even without their transformations, so it doesn’t feel too bad if you can’t get hold of the other half.

Eldritch Moon in Limited and Standard formats

With the release of EMN, Limited formats will now be a majority of EMN packs combined with a couple of SOI packs. This means a complete overhaul of how the games will play out, but we’re expecting synergy-based decks to still be the way to go, with all of the normal strong Limited card staples still being important—efficient removal, evasion, and difficult-to-answer bombs. Given how much fun SOI Limited has been, we’re expecting good things, with the early/late split of many of the cards in EMN helping to make a format that’s full of choices without being paralysingly complex.

Three-mana planeswalkers like Liliana often see play in Constructed formats.

For Standard, we’re expecting the existing strong decks to still be solid at the beginning of the season. Collected Company and White/Green aggressive decks, along with some showing from planeswalker-centric control decks and ramp-into-Ulamog strategies, have been popular so far. For a start, we hope there’s now the critical mass of Madness cards and enablers to make a real deck based around them. Many of the Emerge cards make for interesting ramp targets that still have versatility in the early game, and sacrifice strategies are often powerful.
From a more brute-force perspective, all of the individual Escalate cards are worth considering just as the Investigate cards were, as they require no support to bring their power to the table. We’ve seen in the past how powerful versatility is on a Magic card, and we’re expecting at least one of the three-card “Collective” cycle to show up. The two pairs of rare Meld cards, given how powerful they are on their own, will also be worth trying, with Gisela in particular having a similar set of hyper-efficient stats to the much loved (and hated) Baneslayer Angel from the Standard of the past.
If you want to take a look at the full set, there's a full visual spoiler on the Wizards of the Coast site. If you want to actually get your hands on the set—a week early!—there are prerelease events coming up this weekend (July 16-17) at your local game store. We can recommend them even for people who haven’t played Magic before, as they’re super casual-friendly, and you get to take your new cards home.

Good

Many support cards are provided for Madness, Emerge and Delirium, to help newer players to think about the game’s puzzles
The mechanics cleverly support a mix of early-game and late-game effects, leading to more interactive games

Bad

Meld is so exciting, but a little on the rare side, dulling its impact a touch
Second time round it’s not as concerning for newer players, but some of the issues with Delirium are still there

Ugly

Whilst Investigate wouldn’t have fit in the set from a flavour perspective, it was a great draw-smoothing mechanic and we’ll miss it

Verdict

A weird and wonderful follow-up to an already dark take on classic horror tropes, Eldritch Moon completes a successful return to the much-loved Innistrad, adding just enough new twists to be exciting.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK

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